Wait.... so if you buy it from retail stores and it hooks in with Steam when you install it, does that mean it is permenantly linked to your steam account? Does this mean you would be unable to sell your retail copy for someone else to use with their Steam account?

Most games I don't buy off Steam because once I've finished them , usually I like to sell them on eBay or wherever and get some money back. Only Valve games and games I know I won't sell I buy on Steam.

You can make a new Steam account for the game and sell the account instead...

This is possible, but for the record Valve states you cannot sell Steam accounts and they will permanently deactivate any account found to have changed hands.

__________________I gots one of them high powered gaming computers with an EVGA GTX 480 video thingy and a Q9550 processing device and also one of them Windows 7 64 operating programs with 4GB of some Corsair 1033 DDR2 ram.

I do not buy games with leashes attached. Ever. Too bad, I really wanted this one.

There are more games coming using this or similar ways to tie up a bought game. Game companies don't like second hand market. Funny though, it is consoles that has a big second hand market, PC games have not been prominent in that area.